Texas Book Festival

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg once threw out a surprisingly decent first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game while wearing a pocket protector. Seriously. Here’s our own Bill Morris with a little more on Ginsberg, Beats, and film.

"Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition." Anne Boyd Rioux writes about biography and the distance, good or bad, between subject and biographer for the Los Angeles Review of Books.  

Lucky Alan, which came out in February, is Jonathan Lethem's first new story collection in more than ten years. He talked with Matt Bell about it in an interview at Salon. "What’s great about short stories is the opportunity to play at reinvention; all those new departures, all those new landings to try to stick," he says. You could also read our review of his novel Dissident Gardens.

The Times has announced its long-awaited (and -feared) digital subscription plan: "Under the plan, which begins on March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month free. The most frequent users will pay $15 a month; print subscribers will have unlimited access." A letter to readers about the plan from Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.